Software: E-mail has severe limitations as an online collaboration tool, but it has the benefit of ubiquity. Might it be displaced by something new?

MOST people would agree that computer technology can play a valuable role in helping workers collaborate. Yet they would probably also agree that e-mail, the most widely used example of such collaborative technology, is less than ideally suited to the task. Based on protocols that were created long before the internet took its current form, e-mail continues to thrive for two reasons. It is ubiquitous: your e-mail address, being unique, functions as the internet equivalent of your name, postal address and passport, since it is commonly used to sign into websites. And it is a classic example of a “good enough” tool. It allows people to send messages to individuals or groups, to hold online discussions and to exchange documents and other files.

But an e-mail discussion between more than a few people can quickly fill the participants' in-boxes with a deluge of messages, making the argument hard to follow. Collaborating on a document via e-mail can also be problematic, as different versions start to circulate which must then be reconciled. “The dominant mode these days is still to put attachments on e-mails and send them around, and really, nobody is happy with that,” says Andrew McAfee, an expert on collaboration at Harvard University's Berkman Centre for Internet & Society and the author of “Enterprise 2.0”, a book on the subject.

Yet despite recurrent complaints that “e-mail is broken”, little seems to change. Other collaboration tools have popped up in recent years—including instant messaging, blogs, wikis (web pages that users can edit), social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, web-based applications and micro-blogging services like Twitter—but none has managed to dethrone e-mail. Indeed, many of these services rely on e-mail as an underlying signalling mechanism. When someone posts a comment on your blog, sends you a message on Facebook or starts following you on Twitter, how do hear about it? You get an automated e-mail. Accordingly, people commonly use a combination of various messaging and collaboration tools, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, in both their personal and business lives.

Awkward though this is, e-mail's rigid protocols make it hard to innovate in the in-box. What if e-mail could be given a makeover? That was the question Lars Rasmussen and his brother Jens, two engineers at Google, asked themselves in 2004. Their answer, called Google Wave, was unveiled in May 2009 and is now being tested by thousands of users worldwide. It lets people collaborate in shared discussions, or “waves”, which can encompass many forms of interaction: messaging, notes, comments, collaboration on shared documents and so on. Users can move a slider to “replay” a wave, to see how it reached its current form.

Impressive though this is, can Wave really hope to challenge the supremacy of e-mail? Lars Rasmussen thinks it can, by imitating one of e-mail's strengths and avoiding one of its weaknesses. “We think e-mail is so successful because it's open,” he says. The protocols used to encode and transfer e-mail messages are simple and are not owned by anyone. Wave also has an open architecture that allows other companies to incorporate new things into waves, such as voice-over-internet calling, Twitter feeds, photo albums and so forth. Google hopes that this openness will encourage the wide adoption of the Wave protocols, while also ensuring that the Wave platform does not become fossilised and unable to move with the times, as happened to e-mail.

Although the fledgling platform has some speed and stability problems, and its application programming interface (the means by which other bits of software plug into it) is not yet complete, collaboration experts are excited. Two big software companies, SAP and Novell, are already building add-ons for Wave. SAP's tool, called Gravity, lets users design business processes in Wave, while Novell's Pulse, a stand-alone product that will be released in 2010, will add security features, an improved chat function and live editing of Microsoft Office documents.

Wave's creators see e-mail as their main opposition. But might they face a challenge from an altogether different quarter? The rise of web-mail, instant messaging and web-based applications within companies are all examples of the broader trend of “consumerisation” of technology. From mapping sites to social networks, web-based software evolves much faster than desktop software, which often looks old-fashioned by comparison. “Knowledge workers can look outside the corporate firewall, and realise that everything out there is better, faster and makes them happier,” says Dr McAfee.

One consumer website in particular has already cracked the problem of building easy-to-use collaboration tools with mass appeal. Facebook, now the world's largest social-networking site, allows over 300m users to chat, send messages, post comments, share links, photos and videos, play games, and form groups around shared interests or projects—most of the things that collaboration tools are expected to be able to do, in short. Furthermore it is free, and simple enough that users need no training. Like Wave, Facebook is also open to outside developers.

Facebook's original users, college students, have graduated but still use the site, drawing in their peers in the process: the average Facebook user is now over 30 and a member of the workforce. So adding business-collaboration tools to Facebook would make sense. (Dustin Moskovitz, one of Facebook's co-founders, has just raised funding for a new business-collaboration start-up called Asana.) Some bosses regard social networking as the epitome of online time-wasting. But Facebook, or Wave, or something very like them, could be the future of work.